MIK SABIERS revels in a band that ploughs an idiosyncratic furrow of expletive laden, guitar-driven alt rock
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Taking poetry to picket-lines
ANDY CROFT salutes poet Jack Hirschman, an indefatigable communist activist
Jack Hirschman at Caffe Trieste, in San Francisco, on November 23 2016
[Christopher Michel/Creative Commons]
ANDY HEDGECOCK, MARIA DUARTE and ANGUS REID review Synthetic Sincerity, Our Hero, Balthazar, Heartstopper Forever, and A Year In London
The bard invites readers to a gig, raps for Clacton, and lays out the Burnham-Hurzeler conundrum
RON JACOBS recommends an important book that enhances the oppositional theories put forth by Fanon and, in doing so, remakes psychology itself
JAN WOOLF relishes an extensive history of our long relationship to trees in Britain that underlines the current emergency
DIANE WATT argues that while evidence of sex is not there, a 16th‑century lesbian poet could be Scotland’s answer to Gentleman Jack
KEITH RICHMOND relishes a superbly conceived modern version of Aeschylus’ drama of murderous family succession
JACK HIRSCHMAN, who has died aged 87, was a radical US poet, a familiar face on picket lines and at poetry festivals all over the world.
Hirschman was born in New York in 1933 to a Russian Jewish family. He studied at New York City College and then at Indiana University. In the late 1960s he taught at UCLA, where Jim Morrison (of The Doors) was one of his students. The university fired him for giving A grades to students so they could avoid the Vietnam draft.
Moving to San Francisco, he became friends with Beat writers like Corso and Ferlinghetti, and threw himself into the emerging Street Poetry movement. For the next 50 years Hirschman walked around the streets and cafes of the city, reading his poems wherever he found an audience.
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